Tag: justice department

Background Briefing: May 14, 2020

 

The Whistleblower’s Dark Warning as Trump is Poised to Fire or Muzzle Fauci

We begin with the alarming testimony in the House today from the whistleblower Dr. Bright, the former head of BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, who was fired by Trump in retaliation for expressing concerns that the drug the president was touting was both ineffective and dangerous. Dr. Bright warned that “Our window of opportunity is closing…I fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged…Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history”. Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Department of Population Health joins us. We discuss the ethical stance Dr. Bright is taking compared to the disgraceful behavior of his bosses at HHS who ignored his entreaties to produce masks and PPE instead were awarding boondoggle contracts to cronies. Along with Trump, they have the blood of at least 50,000 Americans on their hands and we assess whether Trump will fire or muzzle Dr. Fauci who was first trashed by the chorus of junkyard dogs at Fox News, then the big dog came in for the kill criticizing Fauci as wanting to play all sides of the equation. Caplan suggests that all the scientists, doctors and experts stop being window dressing for Trump and go on strike if they have to now that it looks like there will be nobody left to tell the public the truth about the pandemic, leaving us to rely on the word of a self-obsessed sociopath who recommends injecting yourself with bleach.

 

Trump, Barr and the DNI Abuse Intelligence to Cook up “Obamagate”

Then with the release of the names of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of Michael Flynn in NSA intercepts of the former national security advisor’s unreported conversations with Russia’s spymaster, we assess whether Trump, with the help of Barr and his toadies at DNI, can whip up enough of a phony scandal to make the manufactured “Obamagate” fraud a sufficient distraction from the Trump death toll. A veteran CIA officer, Robert Baer, who is now an intelligence and national security affairs analyst at CNN joins us to discuss this unprecedented abuse of intelligence as well as the stepping down of the Republican Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

 

The Illiberal Revolution That Has Destroyed the Republican Party

Then finally we speak with Kevin C. O’Leary, a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine about his new book, just out, Madison’s Sorrow: Today’s War on the Founders and America’s Liberal Ideal. He joins us to discuss how there is a counterrevolution underway to overturn the American Revolution’s liberal-conservative worldview with the combination of our racist past and capitalist present. Making Trump the culmination of a political revolution that has destroyed the Republican Party and unleashed an illiberal crusade against the ideals of the Founding Fathers.